Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo plans to announce a reshuffle of his cabinet, said people familiar with the selection process.
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But growth has continued to slide, falling to a six-year low of 4.67 percent in the second quarter, and the government has been criticised for a series of policy flip-flops and a lack of organisation.
In a sign of Widodo’s growing independence from his political patrons, he will accommodate only one additional political appointee from his own party, while the rest of the replacements will be technocrats.
Lembong, who studied at Harvard University, replaces Rachmat Gobel, whose ministry’s recent decision to cut the cattle import quota from Australia angered the public as it led to soaring beef prices.
Widodo’s meteoric rise from furniture businessman to president of the world’s third-largest democracy, and the first to come from outside the political or military establishment, was widely seen as a watershed moment for Indonesia.
Instead, he has been widely seen as sometimes out of his depth and struggling to get around entrenched vested interests. Mr. Nasution served as Governor of the Central Bank from 2009 to 2013.
Wellian Wiranto, an economist with Singapore-based OCBC Bank, said there was hope that Nasution will “have a better chance at coordinating economic policies among the myriad of ministries and agencies which have been largely lacking thus far”. “At the end of the day, however, it will depend on whether he has the political air cover from his boss to do what he needs to do on the ground”.
Other possible new faces in the cabinet are former Minister of Finance Rizal Ramli, Chief Executive Officer of Quvat Capital Thomas Lembong, Head of the PDIP Economic Division Hendrawan Supratikno, and Chief Executive Officer of Indosat Alexander Rusli.
The announcement of the reshuffle is slated for early Wednesday afternoon.
More troubling is word that another veteran PDI-P politician, Pramono Anung, will be joining Jokowi’s cabinent, replacing Andi Widjajanto as Cabinet Secretary.
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“We believe that this will be temporary”, Adityaswara said.
